Sami Berdugo (b. 1970) has established himself as one of the most distinctive and highly regarded authors in Israeli literature since the 2000s.

His stories collected in his debut, Black Girl (1999), deal in various ways with the intricate cross-generational dynamics prevalent in many families of North African descent. With remarkable sensitivity and striking lucidity, Berdugo describes an irresolvable tension between warmth and close intimacy as the cherished ideals of family life and the nearly inevitable sense of oppressive suffocation and estrangement that often result from it. These stories further highlight Berdugo’s deep felt commitment to focusing on “real people” whose lives are defined by a yearning for normalcy and stability, as well as the author’s unmatched ability to appreciate both the beauty of this yearning and the violence with which it is often met in reality.

Berdugo’s next book, the novel This Is How I Speak to the Wind (2002), revolves around a single mother’s struggle to make sense of her non-existent relationship with her soldier son. The novel highlights a significant aspect of Berdugo’s evolution as a writer, namely a strong preference for stylised, dense, demanding prose that blends elements of psychological fantasy with realism in distinctly non-conventional ways.

Notably, the aforementioned friction is inseparable from Berdugo’s thematic exploration of social and linguistic identities in his later work, where power dynamics within the narrative spill over and reshape the relationship between the text and its readers. In his fourth novel That Is to Say (2010), for example, a man abducts his mother from a nursing home and takes her back to their old house in a quixotic endeavor to teach her how to read and write. From this point on, the text becomes a battleground between rival narrators, each with a distinct style, vying for control of the emerging narrative.

His later novels, including An Ongoing Tale on Land (2014) and Donkey (2019), further develop this approach, presenting protagonists who simultaneously narrate and inhabit their stories—revealing and obscuring their flaws, violence, and corporeal rituals through their distinctive use of language. This interplay reaches its most sophisticated expression in Because Guy (2017), opening with the protagonist-narrator’s murder confession. After decades of estrangement from his hometown an family, he finds unlikely sanctuary in the local synagogue. His habit of murmuring to himself in an almost imperceptible voice embodies the paradoxical nature of Berdugo’s dialogic writing—arhetoric that simultaneously withdraws and confronts—while suggesting that genuine communication emerges precisely through moments of friction, absence, and misunderstanding. Berdugo has received numerous literary awards, including the Sapir Prize, the Brenner Prize, and the Bialik Prize.

Photography: Tal Shahar

The procession of history is reflected—at times grotesqely—in the mirror of Castel-Bloom’s books. This includes regional affairs such as two violent Intifadas and the endless dragging through muddy wars, or local flavours of global processes such as the rise of hyper capitalism and the impoverishment of the middle class.

Even in her earliest stories, one cannot miss Castel-Bloom׳s characteristic wounded poker face as a narrator when she observes young lives already anticipating their loss of direction, the disintegration of the promise of stable family and economic life.

The breakdown of social structures and erosion of security and identity emerge as the most prominent themes in her writing—yet she approaches these painful and anxiety- inducing materials from an aesthetic distance, with a characteristic blend of black humor and knowing winks.

Dolly City (1992), arguably Castel-Bloom’s most emblematic work, offers perhaps the most distilled demonstration of the author’s ability to strike and show vulnerability simultaneously. The novel׳s protagonist, Dolly, is conceived as a hybrid of Dr. Frankenstein and the biblical Abraham, inhabiting a dystopian yet uncannily familiar city where she performs her medical experimentations on an abandoned infant.

While Textile (2006) offers a satirical observation of Israel׳s old-money elite, Biotope (2022) contemplates, with amused horror, the widening class divides in Israeli society, a landscape populated by beggars and the nouveau riche. The short story collection Winter Life (2010) moves between a comic view of relationships between men and women in Israeli literature and a more introspective, melancholic, and contemplative writing about questions of aging and personal and familial loss.

Another noteworthy book is The Egyptian Novel (2015), winner of the Sapir Prize, which can be described as Castel-Bloom׳s response to a trend of autobiographical literature and family memoirs at the time. In a deconstructed structure, fusing elements of documentation and theatrical fiction, she formulates a fundamental statement about the possibility of living lives that have missed their purpose and crumbled under expectations, values, and conventions that themselves have disintegrated and eroded. As Israeli reality becomes more violent and concerning, Castel-Bloom invites us to look directly at the absurdity and destruction, but also to
discover new and unexpected meaning among the ruins.

Photography: Reli Avrahami

David Grossman (b. 1954) is widely regarded as the preeminent Israeli author of his generation. Grossman first achieved widespread recognition with the publication of his ambitious and groundbreaking novel

(1986). A bold experimental work in both form and structure, the book explores the possiblity of representing Holocaust memory through aesthetic means.

At the heart of the novel is the story of Momik, a nine-year-old child of Holocaust survivors living in 1950s Jerusalem. By threading together bits of information and scattered words that seep through the veil of his parents’ silence and become ensnared in the web of his vivid imagination, Momik constructs his own private understanding of the “Holocaust.”

Grossman employs a range of literary techniques—encyclopedic montage, pastiche, and fiction-within-fiction—interwoven with meta-narratives, to craft a dazzling kaleidoscope of storytelling. This approach effectively enacts the novel’s central question regarding the role of the story as the final bastion of humanity in a world that has turned its back on it. The release of See Under: Love and the extensive critical discourse it inspired solidified Grossman’s reputation as a leading voice in Israeli literature. Since then, he has published numerous works that have become integral to the Israeli literary canon. Among these are The Yellow Wind (1987), a collection of essays reflecting on his time in the West Bank shortly before the First Intifada, and the monumental novel To the End of the Land (2008), which follows a mother’s journey across Israel in an effort to evade news of her son׳s death in military action.

In a tragic twist of fate, Grossman lost his son, Uri, during the Second Lebanon War in August 2006, while he was working on the novel. Grossman’s works have been translated into dozens of languages, earning him international acclaim.

His numerous awards include the EMET Prize, the Médicis Prize, the Erasmus Prize, and the Heinrich Heine Prize. In 2017, he won the Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks into a Bar (along with translator Jessica Cohen), and in 2018, he was awarded the Israel Prize for Literature.

Photography: Claudio Sforza

Etgar Keret (b. 1967) is one of the most successful Israeli authors of this era and one of the most well recognized Israeli authors internationally.

Already his first volumes of short stories, Pipelines (1992) and Missing Kissinger (1994), showcased a deliberate embrace of a bold, minimalist style that welcomed the use of colloquial language. This represented a radical departure from the highbrow aesthetic and linguistic ideals that had long defined Hebrew literature, establishing Keret as a pioneering literary figure and as a voice for his generation.

Keret׳s masterfully crafted plots are striking snapshots of strangely familiar situations as perceived, challenged or interrogated by somewhat odd or confounded characters—usually children or adults whose socialization remain incomplete. As they navigate these circumstances, they tend to expose, implicate, or subvert ideological centers and collective demands.

Keret׳s world is defined by suffocating banality punctuated by bursts of inexplicable violent fantasies. This reality rarely reveals itself fully, only occasionally disturbing the relatively passive existence and minimally reflective consciousness of Keret׳s characters. As such, Keret׳s stories can be read as postmodern fables that have been uprooted from tradition, prematurely terminated tales whose disoriented protagonists are left to grapple with a seemingly arbitrary and unprocessed reality.

In Keret׳s world, regurgitated remnants of national myths fuse with disturbing metamorphoses and grotesque bodily distortions, driving his characters to the outer limits of the human condition—and beyond. These aspects reflect the influence of cinema and graphic novels on his work; fittingly, Keret has also published comic books and written scripts for film and television.

His work, translated into numerous languages, has received global acclaim. In 2019, he was awarded the Sapir Prize for his book Fly Already.

Photography: Lielle Sand